Multi-well plate readers are key pieces of bioscience equipment used to quickly obtain fluorescence and absorbance information from samples such as live cultures grown in multi-well plates (for example, 96 well plates). A typical reader takes 10 seconds to acquire a complete set of fluorescence or absorbance measurements. However, conventional plate readers do not provide any image information. This represents a significant loss or discarding of image information. For example, imaging of samples including live tissue cultures can reveal cell structure and health information that can provide a wealth of insight to the user. For example, image information of a well that returns a negative fluorescence signal in a toxicity screen can quickly inform a user as to whether the negative signal is due to the cell death, compromised growth, contamination, or other reasons. Generally, to collect image information, the multi-well plate would have to be put into a second sophisticated system that uses a microscope to slowly scan and image each well of the plate individually on a sequential basis. Because such conventional techniques are based on a singular microscope, the process is very slow. The complete process can take upwards of approximately 150 minutes or more for an entire multi-well plate. Such a significant amount of machine time is an inefficient and prohibitive if numerous multi-well plates are to be imaged, for example, because such latency can compromise the time schedule of the experiment design. In view of these constraints, it is not surprising that users often only take this extra imaging measurement step for a small fraction of the samples, or when situations absolutely demand imaging.